Like his father Frederic Eugene Ives, Herbert was
an expert on color photography. In 1924, he transmitted and
reconstructed the first color facsimile, using color separations.
In 1927, he demonstrated 185-line long-distance television,
transmitting the image of then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover
from AT&T's experimental
station 3XN in Whippany, New Jersey.

In the 1940s, Ives expressed his opposition to Einstein's theory of relativity[3]
and argued that Einstein's derivation of the mass-energy relation
was invalid. [4] Ives
asserted in many of his writings that the predictions of special
relativity were wrong[5], and he
also argued against what he regarded as "the indeterminancies and
impotences by which the "Restricted Theory of Relativity" has been
widely publicized".[6]

Ives espoused an ether-based view of physics, somewhat similar
to that of Lorentz, although unlike Lorentz, Ives
maintained that this view contradicted Einstein's special
relativity. Ives attempted to demonstrate the correctness of his
ether-based views and to refute special relativity by means of
logical arguments and experiments. He is best known for the Ives–Stilwell experiment,
which ironically provided direct confirmation of special
relativity's time
dilation factor, although Ives himself denied that the results
were consistent with special relativity. This paradoxical aspect of
Ives's work was described by his friend, the noted physicist H. P.
Robertson, who contributed the following summary of Ives's attitude
toward special relativity in a biography of Ives:

"Ives' work in the basic optical field presents a rather
curious anomaly, for although he considered that it disproved the
special theory of relativity, the fact is that his experimental
work offers one of the most valuable supports for this theory, and
his numerous theoretical investigations are quite consistent with
it… his deductions were in fact valid, but his conclusions were
only superficially in contradiction with the relativity
theory—their intricacy and formidable appearance were due entirely
to Ives' insistence on maintaining an aether framework and mode of
expression. I... was never able to convince him that since what he
had was in fact indistinguishable in its predictions from the
relativity theory within the domain of physics, it was in fact the
same theory... some who have not penetrated to the essence of Ives'
theoretical work have seized upon it as overthrowing the special
theory of relativity, and have used it as an argument for a return
to outmoded and invalid ways of thought."

U. S. President Harry Truman awarded Ives a "Medal for
Merit" in 1948 for his war-time work on blackout lighting and
optical communication systems.[3]

^
For example, in his 1949 paper "Lorentz Type Transformations..."
Ives argued that Einstein's definition of simultaneity was both
"not legitimate" and "not true", and he claimed to have proven this
experimentally in his 1948 paper "The Measurement of the Velocity
of Light...".